Understanding keyword distribution

- [Narrator] Keyword distribution is the process of assigning keywords to specific pages on your website. This is an important step in the content creation process and results in the content on the page being aligned and relevant to the keyword you're targeting on that page. Remember, you can't have an optimized page unless you know what keyword you're optimizing it for. Once you've identified all your target keywords through that keyword research process working in Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, or another spreadsheet program allows you to create this mapping of keywords to the pages in your site structure in an organized way, and it has the added benefit of keeping a record of which pages are targeting which keywords to refer back to in the future.

Of course, you'll be listing out all the current pages of your website, but keep in mind that for many of your target keywords; you won't yet have a page and you'll probably need to create one. By using a spreadsheet, you can easily see where in your sites architecture you'll want to put it and you can define some key pieces of information about it, before you even start writing. Here's an example of a spreadsheet that we've created for a fictitious sample winery. Feel free to format your spreadsheet any way you like, but there are some common fields that you should include.

Down the left hand side, we like to use cells or tabbing to show us the hierarchy of the various sections and pages of our site. As you can see, for each page we have a column for the keyword we'll be targeting with this page, the URL of the page, the title tag meta-description, and h1 header. We've even used a formula function to count our characters so that we can see how close we are to our general targets. Again, our targets of 65 characters for a title and 156 characters for a description, are not hard limits by any means, but they're guidelines that will minimize search engines truncating this information on the search engine results page.

The first step is to populate this spreadsheet with your existing webpages including the title tags, meta-descriptions and h1's or first headers from the page. Be sure to include every page of your site including your Home page, your About page your Location page, Contact page, and other general kinds of content. Remember, search engines want to see unique information for each and every page and listing them all out here is a good way to quickly spot and correct duplications. The second step is to take a look at the keywords from your keyword list and find the most appropriate pages of your site for each of the keywords.

You should make sure to distribute one keyword per page and try not to force anything. Remember, search engines prefer unique and relevant content, so if you have a keyword that doesn't match any page of your site; you'll probably want to create a new one. When you add a new page to your spreadsheet the good news is that you've got a blank canvas; you can define the SEO friendly URL, title , description, and header right here in the spreadsheet; that will define this new page of content. Writing content when you know the keyword you're optimizing it for up-front; allows you to really dial in on all of the best practices of content writing for keywords that we'll be covering later on.

Remember, the meat of each page is the body copy , and you'll probably need to go back through your existing pages to make sure that they're really optimized for the keyword you've defined as a target, and now that you've got your target keyword in mind, it's a pretty good time to head over to one of the on-page analysis tools that we'll talk about in the course as well. The suggestions from these tools can really help guide the changes that you'll be making on your pages. Using a keyword distribution spreadsheet will help you in a number of different ways.

First, it gives you one place to organize and document the content of your site that will support the keywords you're targeting. Second, it serves as an excellent resource your copywriters and will help streamline workflows across the different members of your website production team ,and treating this as a living document will ensure that you can quickly adapt to the changing nature of the search landscape and keep your content strategy on track month after month, and year after year.